FAO has warned that the outbreak of plague African swine that has erupted in China can spread rapidly to other countries of Southeast Asia and the Korean peninsula.
China represents about half of the swine industry worldwide, so the concern in countries outside the Asian continent is also high.
China has numerous animals infected with this virus. The outbreak has arisen thousands of kilometers away, so it is feared that it is not an isolated case.
The authorities have sacrificed, at the moment, some 24,000 pigs in five provinces (the last one, Anhui, according to the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs).
But China is not the only country with outbreaks of swine fever. In Eastern Europe, Romania has had to slaughter more than 100,000 pigs.
Poland, Estonia, Ukraine and Hungary have also reported isolated outbreaks in some of their farms and have responded by slaughtering thousands of animals. Russia lived in 2017 a strain very similar to the one that now alerts China.
This disease, highly contagious among animals and deadly in most cases, does not yet have a vaccine. Only sacrifice is considered as a control system when an outbreak is born.
The symptoms are: high fever, lack of appetite, skin and internal hemorrhages, etc. Death occurs between 2 and 10 days after infection.
However, the alarm affects, for the moment, the meat sector, because according to the UN A swan fever does not represent a danger to human health, which is immune to the virus.
